OSAT Companies Ranking 2016-2017

Despite the common belief, OSAT (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test) companies are very innovative. Many look at TSMC or Synopsys and consider their R&D work as innovative. But actually, semiconductor assembly industry is as innovative as any other company in the industry. We just don’t hear about it.

Semiconductor packaging companies develop technologies constantly but they, unfortunately, don’t enjoy from the ‘grace’ that is associated with EDA or semiconductor foundries. But if you take, for example, the iPhone, many of the features available today in an iPhone are there thanks to advanced packaging technologies.

The OSAT industry is constantly under pressure to deliver innovative solutions, either small sized packaging, or very high performance and high-power packaging solutions. It seems there is always something they need to develop for the future.

We wrote about the relentless development of the semiconductor packaging industry here.

OSAT Market Data

IC packaging market share in 2016 was 54B USD.

Complex packaging (2.5D, 3D, FanOut) will grow in rate of 7.5% / year from 2017 to 2022, while the entire packaging business will grow in rate of 3.5% / year from 2017 to 2022. (source: Yole Développement).

There are over 300 IC packaging companies world-wide. The table shows the top 10 players but there are many small vendors addressing their local market. You can find them here.

Merger and Acquisitions

Merger and acquisitions in the OSAT industry is somewhat unusual but in 2015-2017 were saw some consolidation activities in the market. Here are some of them:

• Market leader, ASE is in discussions to acquire/merge with SPIL – read more here.
• Amkor acquired J-Devices Corporation – read more here.
• Amkor acquired Nanium – read more here.
• JCET acquired STATS ChipPAC – read more here.